SOUND AND CITY – CORFU 2013

Works by composers from the Music, Technology & Innovation Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Curated and presented by Simon Emmerson

Andrew Hill - Phase


Panos Amelides - Alexandros (short version 2013)


Ben Ramsay - The Batteries Of Orchards (2012)


Louise Rossiter - Mordicum (2013)


Luca Forcucci - A Serendipitous Summer (2011) 


Simon Emmerson - Memory Machine (2010)

Andrew Hill - Phase (2009) (audio-visual stereo - 6’00)

This work is inspired by the concept of transformation in a thermodynamic system, from one state of matter to another.

Andrew Hill (1986) is a composer of electroacoustic music, specialising in studio composed works both acousmatic (purely sound based) and audio-visual. His works have been performed extensively across the UK, as well as in Europe and the US. His works are composed with materials captured from the human and natural world, seeking to explore the beauty in everyday objects. He has recently gained a PhD at De Montfort University, supervised by Prof Leigh Landy. www.ahillav.co.uk

Panos Amelides - Alexandros (short version 2013) (stereo - 17’00)

A portrait is an artistic representation with the intent to display the personality of a person. I decided to do the same: to outline the virtues, personality and political action of a persona, but instead of colors I used sounds and composed a ‘sonic portrait’. The person of my focus is Alexandros Panagoulis, a Greek politician and activist who died in 1976. For Alexandros various recordings of the Athenian soundscape were used as well as interviews I took from Panagoulis' brother, Stathis, and Panagoulis’ best friend, ex-minister, Leftheris Veryvakis (who died 2012). All materials were processed, mixed and took their final form using the facilities of Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre at De Montfort University. Alexandros has been presented recently in Italy as part of the Biennial for European and Mediterranean Young Artists, in Cyprus at the European University and in Greece at ‘Beton7’ artistic space. For this concert in Corfu, an excerpt of 17 minutes is presented; the original, full version of the work is of 35 minutes duration. Alexandros is intended for radio broadcasting.

Panos Amelides is a Sonic artist born in Athens. His work focuses on the representation of political and cultural collective memory via means of recorded sound and the artistic possibilities the digital studio provides in terms of storytelling. He creates Sonic artworks for performances, sound installations, dance and theatre. He is conducting a research towards a Ph.D. in Sonic arts at MTIRC at De Montfort University, UK, with Prof. John Young. He graduated with an MA in Electroacoustic Composition from The University of Manchester, with Prof. David Berezan and Dr. Ricardo Climent, and with a BA in Music from Ionian University, with Dr. Theodore Lotis and Andreas Mniestris. His work has been presented throughout festivals and international conferences in Europe and USA. He is a member of the artistic collective 'Hear This Space’, which is active in Leicester, UK, and a member of the Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Composers Association.

Ben Ramsay - The Batteries Of Orchards (2012) (8 channels - 10’15)

The Batteries Of Orchards is formed from various recordings of insects from around the UK including bees from the Welsh borders and wasps from the south west. With some close recording techniques and nominal processing the piece aims to explore the curious world that these garden creatures inhabit.

Ben Ramsay graduated from Middlesex University, London, with a BA (Hons) in Sonic Arts in 2001, and is currently lecturing in Music Technology at Staffordshire University in the West Midlands, UK. His research is centred around acousmatic music composition and the exploration of compositional relationships that exist in modern forms of sound art. He is currently studying for a PhD in Electroacoustic composition at De Montfort University, under the supervision of Prof. Simon Emmerson.

Louise Rossiter - Mordicum (2013) (8 channels – 6’55)

Mordicum is Latin for Fragments. This piece aims to explore expectation for a listener through ambiguity. Throughout the piece it is intended that only mere hints of a real world are given as the listener is hurtled through various sound worlds both expected and unexpected. Most of the sound sources in this piece derive from recordings made during a recent trip to Brussels in October 2012 for the l'Espace du Son contest. Mordicum was realized in the studios of the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre at De Montfort University between November 2012 and January 2013. It received its premiere at Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) in May 2013.

Louise Rossiter (born 1986) is a Scottish electroacoustic composer based in Leicester, UK. Her research interests lie in acousmatic sound, acoustic ecology and expectation within Electroacoustic Music. She completed her undergraduate music degree at the University of Aberdeen, specialising in Acousmatic composition under the supervision of Pete Stollery, and completed her MMus in Composition with distinction at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Robert Dow. She is currently reading towards a PhD under the supervision of John Young and Simon Emmerson at the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre (De Montfort University) with the support of an AHRC studentship. Louise’s music is performed and broadcast around the world, and in the Musica Nova International Composition Competition 2010, her acousmatic work, Black Velvet was announced as a finalist in the competition. Recently Louise has been selected as a finalist in the Franz Liszt Stipendium für Akusmatische Komposition and, in 2012, Louise secured joint 1st prize in the prestigious Concours d’interpretation spatialisée de l’Espace du Son in Brussels. http://www.louiserossiter.com

Luca Forcucci - A Serendipitous Summer (2011) (stereo digital version – 6’00)

Original - One Performance and Five Acetates Discs. Auditory perception of the environment is an approach to feel the (sonic) landscape: Shanghai has grown quickly and old sounds are sharing the soundscape with newish sounds. What is (was) the sonic identity of Shanghai? What is the sonic presence of nature in Shanghai? A Serendipitous Summer explores the urban sonic environment through a soundwalk based on psychogeography, where a convergence between nature and the city is proposed. The collected sonic material during the soundwalk is the source for a performance and for five acetates discs. Nostalgia is encapsulated into the discs, which will be progressively altered after each listening experience until an unknown result, but relates also to the past experience of recording. Progress would be an emphasized perception of the environment by a dedicated listening experience, where according to the French philosopher Barthes hearing is a physiological phenomenon and listening is a psychological act. Utopia is metaphorically the creature of sound that emanates from the composed soundscapes. The acetate discs are available at Shanghai Art Plus Gallery

www.artplusshanghai.com

Luca Forcucci is a binational Swiss and Italian composer and artist. His work observes the perceptive properties/relations of sound and space (and vice versa) through sound installations, visuals, compositions and performances. In order to explore the field of possibilities for sound in a context of music and art as experience, the works converge with dance, digital performance, poetry, architecture and neuroscience. In this context, he is interested by perception and consciousness.
His compositions have spanned through the years from electronic music, which was produced by Al Comet from The Young Gods, to field recordings collected around the world in urban contexts like Sao Paulo, Shanghai, San Francisco and natural ones like the Amazon forest or the Swiss Alps to name a few. His last work FOG HORNS is published by Subrosa. He is also a PhD student supervised by Prof Leigh Landy at MTIRC, De Montfort University. www.lucalyptus.com

Simon Emmerson - Memory Machine (2010) (8 channel – 12.00)

Memory Machine is a ‘concert installation’ piece. It is a variable work (run from a MAX patch) which will rarely be heard exactly the same twice. It is in part inspired by mediaeval and renaissance ideas of mapping places, images and other objects of memory onto an imaginary stage – see Frances Yates’s book The Art of Memory (1966). In some of these ‘memory theatres’ (in the writings of Robert Fludd, for example) there are five doors which act as ‘loci’ for the placing of memories. I have used this as a starting point for the spatialisation of sound in this work. There are layers of memory, crossfades, unlikely combinations, distortions of time, interruptions. There are memories of soundscapes I have recorded over the past 35 years – a concert harp played in the wind, water sounds, the inside of a beehive. There are also frozen memories of music which has some significance to me. Memory Machine was commissioned by the Inventionen Festival Berlin 2010, composed during my period as Edgar Varese Visiting Professor at TU (2009-2010), with the support of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm. It was first performed on the TU ‘Wave field system’ on 27^th July 2010.

Simon Emmerson is Professor of Music, Technology and Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester. He works mostly with live electronics including works for Philip Mead (piano) with the Royal Northern College of Music Brass Quintet, Darragh Morgan (violin), also purely electroacoustic commissions from the IMEB (Bourges), the GRM (Paris) and Inventionen (Berlin). He has contributed to and edited The Language of Electroacoustic Music (Macmillan, 1986) and Music, Electronic Media and Culture (Ashgate, 2000). His book Living Electronic Music was published by Ashgate in 2007 as well as two solo CDs of live electronic works with Sargasso (2007 & 2008). He was founder Secretary of EMAS/Sonic Arts Network in 1979, served on the Board until 2004. In 2008 he was asked to join the Board of its successor organisation Sound and Music.